A good example of why totally open chips are problematic in the
   commercial world.
   Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability: Which is More
   Important to You?
   [1]https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5127
   As always, the devil is in the details.
   " You can’t have it both ways: the whole point of transparency is to
   enable peer review, so you can find and fix bugs more quickly. But if
   every time a bug is found, a manufacturer had to hand $50 to every user
   of their product as a concession for the bug, they would quickly go out
   of business. This partially answers the question why we don’t see open
   hardware much beyond simple breakout boards and embedded controllers:
   it’s far too risky from a liability standpoint to openly share the
   documentation for complex systems under these circumstances. "
   " However, even one of their most ardent open-source advocates pushed
   back quite hard when I suggested they should share their pre-boot code.
   By pre-boot code, I’m not talking about the little ROM blob that gets
   run after reset to set up your peripherals so you can pull your
   bootloader from SD card or SSD. That part was a no-brainer to share.
   I’m talking about the code that gets run before the architecturally
   guaranteed “reset vector”. A number of software developers (and
   alarmingly, some security experts) believe that the life of a CPU
   begins at the reset vector. In fact, there’s often a significant body
   of code that gets executed on a CPU to set things up to meet the
   architectural guarantees of a hard reset – bringing all the registers
   to their reset state, tuning clock generators, gating peripherals, and
   so forth. Critically, chip makers heavily rely upon this pre-boot code
   to also patch all kinds of embarrassing silicon bugs, and to enforce
   binning rules."
   If, OTOH, there were ways to manufacture arbitrarily complex chips on
   the desktop for reasonable costs and in reasonable time, and so
   eliminate the commercial issues, this conundrum could vanish.

   On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 9:13 AM, Steven Schear
   <[2]schear.steve@gmail.com> wrote:

   [3]http://parallel.princeton.edu/openpiton/open_source_processors.php

References

   1. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5127
   2. mailto:schear.steve@gmail.com
   3. http://parallel.princeton.edu/openpiton/open_source_processors.php